


not the worst of it

by potted_music



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-08
Updated: 2018-08-08
Packaged: 2019-06-23 19:59:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15613905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/potted_music/pseuds/potted_music
Summary: It's not hero worship if you are indeed confronted with a hero, or so Henry Le Vesconte would like to believe.





	not the worst of it

**Author's Note:**

> The idea of Le Vesconte being jealous of JFJ's friendship (or more) with Crozier originates from [an excellent drabble](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14940449/chapters/36086427) by lafiametta, who kindly let me play in this sandbox. Go read it, if you haven't: the drabble has a much kinder portrayal of Le Vesconte, for one! I mean, go read all her drabbles, they are excellent.

Hard as it might be to believe, when they first met at the gunnery course on HMS Excellent, back in ’38, Henry disliked James on sight. At that point, James’ career in the Navy, such as it were, could be described as a shipwreck only charitably, for a shipwreck presupposes dignity and tragedy, whereas James’ stalled advancement found a more fitting comparison in a dinghy run aground by a tipsy midshipman. The man himself, however, recounted it as an event no less momentous than Poseidon wrecking Odysseus’s raft, and would have provided heroic couplets too, if only his talents as a poet were not so meagre that even he himself was forced to admit his shortcomings in this one area at least. Henry’s dislike, therefore, reached deeper than the natural suspicion for a man hard on his luck, and had more to do with James’ flamboyant belief that the world would not hesitate to bend to his will, if only he strode up to it with purpose and a fetching smile, and his certainty that luck could be bought for the price of a colourful story. 

The reason for his dislike, in short, was not that different from the reason for his love. No different from it at all, to be more precise.

 

*  
_"By late autumn, the temperatures sunk so low that teeth would explode from the cold right in your head, the smell below decks by late winter made me reminisce fondly of the Guano Island, and the lead in our canned food was far from the most offensive thing about it, for that questionable distinction was reserved either for the mushy texture or for the taste, of which the less is said the better."_

_Henry can hear, and shares, the thrilled tension of the dramatic pause, the audience waiting with rapt attention for the denouement and shuddering with delight when it does come:_

_"But that's not the worst of it."_

*

James, in short, lived on a scale completely incongruous to his surroundings, a patch of a detailed coastal chart pasted onto a small-scale map with little regard for the ragged edges that failed to cohere.

“It’s a rite of passage,” James said almost wistfully, visiting him in the sick bay after Henry had lost his toes to frostbite. “Have you heard about the Less Than Ten Society?”

James lounged on a rickety stool as if it was a luxurious ottoman. Floating on the distant echo of pain, dulled by a stiff dose of laudanum, Henry was almost tempted to reach out and touch him, to drag his fingers along the curve of his lips and hear the sharp intake of breath, surprised but not offended.

“Well, it is little wonder that you haven’t heard of their proceedings, given how many reputations are at stake,” James continued, whipping his head to the side to shake a stray lock of hair off his brow, “for their soirées are a dark and fascinating legend among those in the know. I envy you your membership, my friend. I will stand you a year’s worth supply of the best claret if you manage to procure me an invitation.”

“You might still earn your membership,” Henry rasped from his hammock.

“Me?” The disbelief on James’ features was so genuine that Henry would bet his remaining toes, all four of them, that the man had honestly never considered the possibility that any misfortune might befall him.

James’ yarn had as little grounding in reality as the engravings of monsters at the edges of the world on old maps, Henry’d wager, but he did not have it in him to begrudge him a good story, for James, he knew, judged human weaknesses with an absent-minded benevolent disbelief. Until Crozier, that is.

*  
_"And with the last superhuman effort, Franklin led the beast away from the men cowering in fear in the wrecked tent. When our time comes, as it must, not a few of us, no doubt, will envy him the heroism of his final moments._

_‘But that, too, was not the worst of it yet.”_

*

Crozier cut James down to size. This whittling was as gradual as it was deliberate, and since it happened incrementally, Henry, on looking back, could not even see a point when James had not been behaving different when around Crozier, and certainly not since Franklin’s tragic demise.

Overhearing Franklin’s private meetings with Crozier had been their shared lark, the expediency of knowing the commanders’ minds serving as the fig leaf to cover their curiosity and joy in bending the rules together, as they had been doing for years.

"That is how you want me to see us? In need of saving?" Franklin snapped at Crozier, and Henry, not for the first time, regretted the Admiralty’s shortsightedness in appointing him, and not James, second.

Trying as James’ faith in himself might be at times to the lesser beings around him, his boisterous refusal to acknowledge the tenets of common sense did usually make reality kowtow to him. He always had it easy, Henry thinks with barely a hint of besotted resentment: James was never told that one cannot dance into the enemy camp to distribute seditious leaflets and walk away unscathed, so he did; James was never told that a man-of-war cannot be sailed upriver in the shallow Tigris, and so he did. James would never need saving, and those closest to him were safe in this enchanted sphere.

"When is the point of no return?" James asked several months after Franklin’s death. "We must start to preserve all things portable now."

It’s the fact that it was James who spoke the words that chilled Henry to the bone, more than the Arctic squall, or the words’ implication.

*

_"Even a two-bit traveling circus laughed out of every village fair around the country would have scoffed at what passed for decorations at our carnival. The dresses, moreover, were moth-eaten and gaping with holes, rendering the entire affair slightly more outré than it needed to be. If you believe that moths cannot thrive at that latitude, think twice: sturdy little chaps they are, the moths, and many a seaman would do well to emulate their fortitude. But even that is not the worst of it yet."_

*

Henry feared that the smell of smoke and ashes still clinging to his clothes would betray his presence as certainly as the deafening patter of his heart, yet they were all, fortunately or unfortunately, similarly masked, and with their numbers so drastically diminished, nobody was milling in the passage outside the great cabin. Nobody but him, that is.

Sadness enveloped him at the thought that James would probably never be his fellow spy and co-conspirator again. The expedition would, without a doubt, entrench James’ position in the Admiralty’s upper echelons, he forever the one spied on by obsequious underlings, and Henry forever a step behind and below. The lost intimacy of shared mischief rankled, and, deep in thought, it took him a moment to recognize the hushed voice coming from behind the great cabin’s sliding doors.

“Please-” The breathless desperate keening, as if his life was at stake, certainly could not be coming from James, or at least not the James he knew. “Please, Francis.”

Henry was ready to rush in to protect his captain, before a thought more horrifying altogether froze him in place. Grounded like a ship on a reef, without a hope of continuing blithely on the same course, he stood there, afraid to breathe too loudly.

“Are you sure, James?” Francis’ voice raspy with unpractised tenderness.

The fumbling of clothes; something falling to the floor – a cap? a coat?; “Yes. Damn your eyes, yes.”

Unless he stepped away, and fast, Henry would be forced to witness another man do that which he never dared to.

(James undresses, seemingly unselfconscious in his utter faith that admiration was no more than his rightful due. Was he though, Henry thinks, from the vantage point of the present? Or was James expecting his adoration to guarantee support and obedience? His long back, bronze like a statue and ostensibly just about as interested in human touch, or his touch, to be more precise, flashes against the dark water of the Tigris. He is a confident if not a competent swimmer, so Henry stays by his side, briefly imagining them as Aristogiton and Harmodius, slayers of the double tyrant of banality and old age.)

Who but James would be careless enough to engage in something so obviously immoral, not to mention illegal, protected by nothing but presumed disinterest of the remaining crew?

A gasp, followed by a pause barely long enough to hope that Henry misinterpreted everything, followed by a soft slap of skin on skin.

He imagined Crozier using the body Henry admired from afar, spreading and opening up, making room for himself. A grunt from behind the door, clearly Crozier’s. So, this was why James stopped telling him things about the commander; this was why James succumbed to Crozier’s morose presentiment of defeat.

(The closest Henry ever got to physical intimacy with James was that one time when they used the same doxy. James went first, clapped Henry on the shoulder on the way out.

"Drunk, old boy?"

Drunk, on the thought of putting his member where James's has been not a quarter hour earlier. He spread the doxy’s legs wide and licked her clean, pressing his nose into the sweaty curls James had touched, pushing his tongue into the slick hole James has thrust into, stealing his taste and his smell.)

He considered knocking on the door, catching them in flagrante delicto, watching them grovel in fear: but would they though? He scuttled away as quietly and as quickly as his feet would go.

*

_“The boats, clearly tired of carrying us, sensed the moment to take their revenge, and grew heavier with each mile. Moreover, when we took stock of the library we dragged with us, it turned out that Lt. Irving, in charge of packing it, deemed it prudent that we should have more by way of moral treatises than anything that might actually lift the spirits._

_‘But even that was not the worst of it yet.”_

*

As they circled the perimeter of the camp, eyes searching for signs of danger between the tents almost as much as on the distant horizon, James was quiet.

“Imagine the stories you would tell,” Henry said, if only to goad James’ thoughts out. That failing, he implored, “Tell me a story.”

“There’s been all too many stories, Henry.”

“Yes, but you are the only one who makes them true.”

He expected to see gratitude for and comfort in his unwavering faith, but for the briefest of seconds, anger contorted his features instead, and Henry shrunk back, never having seen James’ anger directed at him. It's as if he were giving James what he wanted, yet not what he needed. But the moment, thankfully, was brief, and could be forgotten.

“Alright,” James said, “Alright. Listen…”

His voice was cracking, as were his lips. There was blood in his eyes. When each word was bought with an effort, the breath wasted on each sentence shortening the distance he might walk the next day by a step, or more than a few steps, his smile and his readiness to talk to Henry has got to count for something, or so Henry told himself.

*

Nothing James could tell would be the worst of it, and the worst, when it came, resisted telling, for the end of James marked the end of stories, and Crozier took whatever last words James might have said and kept them, the miser trembling over small change. When James fell in harness, he had eyes only for Crozier, even though Henry was there, right there by him.

Henry did not for a moment doubt that James would have organized a daring caper to rescue Crozier from the mutineers, for the best stories have daring capers, and James lived his life as if he was never tempted to step off the pages of a romance. But without the glamour and stories, all that was left was the truth of failing bodies, scared, and tired, and aggrieved.


End file.
